What D.J. Moore to Buffalo Means for Fantasy Football

On March 5th, it was announced that the Chicago Bears would be trading veteran D.J. Moore to the Buffalo Bills for Day 2 Draft considerations. While the Bears have enough of an offensive infrastructure to handle the departure, the Bills have hoped to fill a void in their wide receiver room that has hampered the team since Stefon Diggs left town. After years of waiting for another No. 1 option, has Buffalo accomplished what they’re looking for, or have they simply landed themselves yet another WR2?

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D.J. Moore Wide Receiver Profile

D.J. Moore’s lengthy streak of playing in every game over the last five seasons and some built-in chemistry with sophomore quarterback Caleb Williams weren’t enough to keep him afloat amidst an influx of new weapons in Chicago for the 2025 season. Despite running the 11th-most routes (558) in the entire NFL, the veteran dropped all the way down to WR41 in Fantasyland, making most of his hay as a red zone threat and occasional deep-ball target.

Fighting with Colston Loveland, Rome Odunze, and rookie Luther Burden for target share, Moore notched career-lows in receptions (50) and yardage (682) just two years after logging a 96-1,364-8 stat line with Justin Fields and Tyson Bagent in 2023.

The wind-sprint nature of his routes and an apparent disconnect between Moore and quarterback/scheme led to a massive drop-off in yards per route run, while a whopping 37.7% of his targets came 15 or more air yards down the field. Compare that to the previous two seasons, when that mark sat at 25.7% (2023) and 17.9% (2024); years in which he was able to flex his YAC ability, gaining nearly 1,100 yards after the catch before dropping to a measly 224 mark last year.

It was pretty clear from the jump (Moore didn’t have a seven-target game until Week 12) that head coach Ben Johnson wasn’t looking to feature the former Carolina Panther as the focal point of the offense, and there’s certainly a possibility that it may have had a hand in some of the more lackadaisical play we saw pop up throughout the season. Whether that’s true or not, what we can see with certainty is the fact that the Bears had a top-10 offense without featuring D.J. Moore, and you can absolutely see why Chicago had no qualms shipping him out of town for a second-round Draft selection while avoiding some of the cap hits they were going to endure over the next couple of years.

Chicago’s loss will (hopefully) be Buffalo’s gain.

How D.J. Moore Fits in Buffalo

One needs to look no further than the Bills’ end-of-season depth chart (or heck, the depth charts of the last two seasons) to understand why they may have felt the need to overpay for an aging wide receiver. Although Khalil Shakir is a very solid player who excels in the around-the-line-of-scrimmage game, it is exceedingly difficult to build your entire passing offense around a guy with a 3.5 aDOT.

Sometimes that was the best option for Josh Allen because the rest of the roster was comprised of throwaways and what could best be described as No. 4/5s on a more fleshed-out passing attack. Brandin Cooks, Keon Coleman, Curtis Samuel, and Mecole Hardman all ran very real routes in the team’s 33-30 Divisional Round loss to the Denver Broncos. It’s truly a testament to 1.) how good Josh Allen is and 2.) how the team is doing its best to waste some prime years of one of the game’s best players. But how much does D.J. Moore truly move the needle?

While there’s no guarantee that we’re returning to the 1,000+ yard, nearly 100-reception glory days, it is a good sign that recently promoted head coach Joe Brady was Moore’s offensive coordinator back in his stop with the Carolina Panthers and almost assuredly had a hand in pushing for him to come over to Buffalo. Over their previous nearly-two-season partnership, Moore ran a vast majority of his routes from an outside alignment, a big departure from his final year in Chicago, in which he was lined up in the slot 31.7% of the time; the highest mark since his rookie season (33.0%).

Moore should see some action out of the slot moving forward, but we know an outsized sample of those “PPR scam” screen passes are going to go to Shakir, who has led the position in those targets over the last two seasons. Where Moore can make up some ground from those easy-button throws is on broken plays. Caleb Williams is showing he can do some crazy things from a collapsing pocket, but he’s still got some room to make up if he’s going to get to Allen’s level. It’s hard to argue against Moore looking pretty unengaged on some of those broken plays in the past, but a change of scenery might help him stay on his game.

Fantasy Outlook for the Bills’ Pass-Catchers

The Bills are going to continue to run plenty of multiple-TE packages with some combination of Dalton Kincaid, Dawson Knox (if he’s not released), and Jackson Hawes, but Moore should still be involved in nearly all of 2-WR sets. Though he’s not exactly known for his next-level run blocking, Buffalo just doesn’t have enough playmakers on the squad to be rotating their new puzzle piece off the field.

Though the veteran doesn’t offer the potential high-upside downfield target that Keon Coleman theoretically does, his presence can’t be seen as anything but a massive negative to the 2024 second-round pick. Particularly when you factor in the fact that owner Terry Pegula lambasted the decision to draft Coleman in a recent press conference, something I’m sure didn’t give the wide receiver an abundance of confidence regarding his role in the offense moving forward.

Given a fully healthy season, we could legitimately see Shakir out-targetting Moore, though with so many of those raw targets coming at or behind the line of scrimmage, the looks that the former Bear gets should be far more valuable to us in fantasy. We should expect to see far more intermediate work here in the 2026 season, as opposed to Moore’s deep-ball, red zone look, or nothing pie that he was gifted while sharing the field with Odunze, Burden, and Loveland.

That doesn’t guarantee a return to his top-12 glory days —far from it—, but if we lower our expectations to more of a solid WR3, we could be in business. His presence impacts Shakir’s already-limited ceiling, which drops him into WR4 range in PPR leagues and keeps him in spot-start consideration in other league settings. Kincaid remains in that fringe TE1 range, while an already fraught offseason for Coleman is only getting worse, leaving him in an easy spot to ignore for fantasy purposes.

Bottom Line

• D.J. Moore steps out of the shadow of his younger contemporaries to find himself on a roster with a desperate need for a playmaker for Josh Allen.
• While Khalil Shakir and Dalton Kincaid will have their useful pockets of fantasy production, we can safely ignore the rest of the Bills’ pass-catchers.
• Look for the Bears to address WR3 through a mid-round pick or with their own free agent addition, but neither of those routes should have a massive impact on Rome Odunze, Colston Loveland, or Luther Burden. They should each be in a fantastic spot for us to attack in the 4th-5th round range.
• According to current Underdog ADP, Moore is coming off draft boards as the WR35, jumping a massive 27 spots since the end of February. That sixth-round capital is a fine price to acquire the veteran, but at this rate, it’s going to flirt with the fifth round, where his former teammates are leaving boards. If that’s the case, there are some potential upside cases to make for other options, so keep your exposure in check.